I am delighted that the Worcestershire Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) has been successful in its bid for £4.8 million of Government funding to test and develop 5G technology.
The introduction of 5G will allow the UK's digital economy to forge forward by creating better mobile connectivity and hosting new technologies. By the middle of the next decade, 5G is expected to be the pre-eminent platform for mobile communications and it is very exciting that Worcestershire will now play a role in its early development and implementation.
The Worcestershire 5G Consortium launches next month and will begin what the LEP describes as "the country's most comprehensive industrial 5G Testbed trial" in partnership with a team of 5G specialists and business experts. Worcester Bosch and Yamazaki Mazak have been selected to experiment with the new technologies and QinetiQ will use the Testbed to advance cyber security application.
I have seen the dedication with which members of the LEP have constructed and advocated this bid and was happy to write letters of support to Ministers in Government that attested to their strength of their application. This success is down to their hard work and look forward to seeing the wider impact that the development of new 5G technologies will have on the local economy.